Sunday, September 4, 2016

Jonny West Coast Says Hello.

"Sell your crazy somewhere else!"

I have a longtime involvement with my university's paper. I've taught classes in the major, been an advisor. I wrote a column for a while, and I've been an advisor off and on. I love what a great school paper can do. And other times I just wish the building would blow up.

This example from last month is not even that bad; it's just got this "attitude" that I see more and more that drives me batty. I will try to mark some "flava" and then provide a link to anyone interested in more:

Lies College Professors Tell Us: College is only an extension of high school in which students continue to decipher and read in between the lines of what their college professors are saying. Be alert, don’t take their every word too seriously. Some statements we hear semester after semester, class after class. “This is going to help you in the real world.” Lies. Hearing this statement for all four years of high school, we’ve finally concluded that derivatives and the timeline of the presidents are definitely not going to help us in the future.

While reading Sunny Tsai's article I found myself wondering "serious or satire?" Point 1 about cramming for exams was a good candidate for satire, but #2 about texts simply repeated untruths without the reductio ad absurdum that satire should provide. Points 3 and 4 about cell phones and attendance just made me say "so what?" and #5 was the resplendent ignorance about "the real world" I'd already reacted to in my first comment. And then, as EC1 has noted, the final line. Bleargh.

Definitely a very weak ending. It demonstrates one of the weaknesses of list-writing as a genre, I think: you don't have to have a real, overarching point/theme, and it tends to show when you get to the end and don't know how to wrap things up. The ending to the UC Berkeley version (which does seem pretty similar, and stronger overall, though not by a lot) is a bit stronger, but not by much.

I've got considerable sympathy for #2 (textbook cost) and some sympathy for #4 (I'm not convinced that lectures are a particular useful instructional device, but I think the author misunderstands the purpose of discussion groups -- to build on material conveyed in lecture and readings and practice the skills of synthesis and analysis, not to "catch up" with missed material. Admittedly, that's a humanities-infused view).

#s 1, 3, and 5 probably point as much to the weaknesses of the system in which both students and professors are trapped (too-large classes, too much reliance on the sort of tests for which you can cram, too little connection to the real-life scenarios in which certain skills, and the ability to grasp/manipulate facts, if not particular facts themselves, will come in handy), rather than anything the professors themselves are doing by choice. That, of course, is the ultimate sign of extreme naivete/lack of sophistication about how the world, and the university, actually works (so, yes, ultracrepidarianism; I, too, just expanded my vocabulary; thanks, OPH!): the assumption that professors are actually in charge.

I was thinking the "derivatives" referred to by the author were of the slope of the function type, with applications in physics and engineering, etc., but the point stands: hearing something for four years of high school does not in itself qualify one to speak of its applicability to one's future career or otherwise.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.